M. John Harrison Wins 2026 Booker Prize With Science Fiction Novel 'The End of Everything'

On Monday in London, the British writer M. John Harrison, 81, was named winner of the 2026 Booker Prize for fiction for "The End of Everything," a satirical dystopian novel. The prize carries 50,000 pounds, about US$67,000. It is the first time a work of science fiction has taken the award.

Harrison beat five other finalists. Among them were two previous winners, Douglas Stuart and Marlon James, who had been the oddsmakers' favourites, and the Pulitzer Prize laureate Elizabeth Strout. At 81, Harrison is the oldest writer to win the Booker, two years older than Margaret Atwood was when she won in 2019. The book is his 13th novel, and he has been publishing for six decades.

The novel is set on England's Channel coast in the near future. An unspecified calamity has shattered society and brought an influx of enigmatic alien entities to Britain. At its centre is a beachcomber who lives with his gun-toting aunt and finds a puzzling, shape-shifting artifact on the shore. Critics have praised its dark humour, though some have found its elusive narrative confusing.

Mary Beard, the historian who chaired the judging panel, described it as "the politics of now seen through the lens of the future," about a society undergoing a catastrophe it does not really understand. She said Harrison's point is that when catastrophe comes, you will not know what is happening, and that in places the reader is left with the characters, not fully understanding. "I think that's fantastically exciting," she said. The judges, who included the poet Raymond Antrobus and Jarvis Cocker, the singer from Pulp, met for four or five hours, and the choice was unanimous. Beard was firm that the prize was "not a lifetime achievement award": "We thought this was a book that had earned it."

At a news conference after the ceremony, Harrison said he did not want to be hemmed in by the science fiction label. Recognition after six decades, he said, shows that the era of "genres as fences and boxes, pigeonholes, is over," and that a book can mix not just two genres but three or four. Asked what he hoped readers would take from the novel, he said it is a grim world that will stay grim, and weird, but that at the end of things there may be some kind of relief, though he would not call it hope or closure.

Harrison's credentials in the genre are long. He spent years working for the speculative fiction magazine New Worlds and won the Arthur C. Clarke science fiction award for an earlier novel, "Nova Swing." Before the win, he said he had spent 40 to 50 years trying to shift the balance as a novelist and critic, asking why a well-written work of science fiction should not be considered literary fiction. Borders between publishing genres have blurred, but it remains rare for science fiction to win a major literary prize.

After winning, he was blunt about the industry, saying publishers had done nothing to break down category barriers. "There's almost no point these days in writing your own book, because it will be framed as something else to sell it," he said, calling that to a degree quite offensive to the author. The Booker, he said, "gives you permission to be what you are, without a label stuck on your forehead."

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, noted that the prize has removed references to "literary fiction" from its materials because "all fiction is literary." Beard called the win recognition of what some would see as the blindingly obvious: that great books exist in every genre.

Founded in 1969, the Booker is open to English-language novels from any country published in the U.K. and Ireland, and has a reputation for transforming writers' careers. Past winners include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Arundhati Roy; last year's was "Flesh" by the Hungarian-British writer David Szalay. As for the money, Harrison said he would probably spend it on repairs to the house, "because being an author means your house is falling down all the time." Whether publishers follow the prize's lead on genre labels is the question that now hangs over the win.